The statements in this section merely provide background information related to the present disclosure and may not constitute prior art.
It is commonly required in the field of Information Technology to provide a service that searches through data sources. The data source herein may refer to data and/or document(s) on the Internet, intranet, storage devices, and so on. In order to use a search engine, a user seeking information on a desired topic generally inputs a search query consisting of keyword(s) or phrase(s) relevant to the topic into the search interface of the search engine. In response, the search engine typically displays a report with a prioritized list of links pointing to relevant documents containing the search keywords. Oftentimes, a short summary of text i.e., extract/snippet is also included for each result. The extract/snippet is that portion or portions of the text in the document that contain the keywords from the search query. In addition, to facilitate easy understanding of the search results, the keyword(s) from the search query contained in the extracts may be highlighted.
US 20120150861 A1 disclosed a method of identifying answers to search queries and highlighting the answers when they appear in search results. This is however limited to the answers in the snippet merely to direct the user's attention to the answers.
While highlighting the keywords and answers in search results is helpful, it is not sufficient in fully understanding the search results. A drawback in such limited highlighting in the search results is that it does not help the user in understanding the significance of the information in the search results, thereby making the results less useful to the user.
Another drawback of the existing search results is that it takes the user considerable amount of time and effort to understand the found results. There are no clues in the search results which will help the user to quickly identify remarkable information within the search results.
In view of the above drawbacks, there remains a need for an effective method of searching data sources for useful information relating to topics of interest.